Sunday, February 28, 2010

Today's New York Times "Ideas and Trends" feature is pegged to the flap over German novelist Helene Hegemann's Axolotl Roadkill, which was published last month, and which plagiarizesremixes passages from various other books. Hegemann is unapologetic: “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” she insists.

This leads the Times' Randy Kennedy to lead us in a thought exercise. Kennedy writes:

Think of almost any kind of cultural endeavor and then use the word “we” to describe its creation. The communal pronoun trips easily off the tongue when talking about the world of contemporary arts and entertainment, where things are often the product of teams, workshops, studios or institutions, where collaboration and idea-swapping are the norm. But now try applying it to creative writing, especially to fiction and poetry, and it can sound absurd: “We worked for years on the character development and the voice, and when we finally nailed the subtle epiphany, we cracked open a bottle of Champagne to celebrate.”

Not that there isn’t the occasional team-written novel. But the popular conception of the creative writer is still by and large one of the individual trying to wrestle language, maybe even the meaning of life, from his soul, the kind of lone battle Jonathan Franzen described himself waging in writing The Corrections, which he sometimes did in the dark, wearing earplugs and earmuffs, trying to hold his mind “free of clichés.”

Kennedy's story isn't actually about crowdsourced or open-source art; it's not about team-writing. It's about pastiche, cut-up, remixing. But his thought exercise — well, I'm tempted to stealupcycle it for my opening remarks at SXSW!

Saturday, February 27, 2010

What happens when you allow the members of the crowd to interact? On this blog we've looked at examples in which each member of the crowd is unaware of the other members participating in the same task, and yet collectively their efforts are aggregated in interesting ways.

Given my previous work with collective viewing patterns on YouTube, which investigated word-of-mouth interactions amongst the consumers of video content, I was excited when I came across a great example of interactions between producers of video content in this great video.

What's great about this video is that much of it could have been produced in a completely crowdsourced way by specifying rules that each participant could follow without ever interacting with the other players (cover camera for 3 seconds, rotate in chair for 10 seconds, look up for 1 second, etc). However at some point there is an actual interaction between members of the crowd when they start showing up in eachother's videos.

Makes me wonder how large something like this could be scaled up without allowing actual interactions?

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Over at HiLobrow (one of my other blogs) today, our artist-in-residence Edrie (of Army of Toys) explains that Sleep No More, the American Repertory Theatre/Punchdrunk's Macbeth, a version set in an abandoned school building and described as "part installation art, part interactive, self-guided theater" — didn't sound interactive enough.

So while she was waiting on line to enter the show. Edrie handed out nearly 30 red feathers to other theatergoers, with the following instructions:

You can keep this in your pocket as a souvenir for your time in line

You can hold it out to other people you meet and see what happens

You can use the feather to interact with the set without disturbing the integrity of the play

To one participant she gave a blue feather, with these instructions:

Give this to a person with a red feather and quietly let them know they must not keep it but pass it on to another person with a red feather

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Shawn Allen is a partner at Stamen Design, a small San Francisco-based firm with big ideas. Stamen does lots of work with maps, data visualization, information trends, and collective think-tankery. Indirect Collaboration's Tim Lillis interviewed Shawn about Stamen's process and philosophy in February 2010.

Lillis: Stamen Design seems to occupy a space somewhere between a design firm and a think tank. Are your research projects driven by your commercial work, vice-versa, or other?

Allen: Probably more vice-versa. I think of most of our work as "research" in the sense that we often don't really know what we're building when we start. Through the process of investigating the data and visualizing it for ourselves, we come up with something that our clients can either (in the case of more commercial projects) provide to their users or (in the case of our more think-tanky work) use to learn something interesting about their own information. The really good projects provide us with an opportunity to play with some new technology or investigate an idea that's been rattling around in our heads for a while. If we don't find that opportunity in our commercial work, though, we usually end up just building it for ourselves—this is how Crimespotting came to be.

Lillis: Crimespotting was a big hit for you guys. Can you tell me more about its inception?

Allen: Oakland Crimespotting was originally a research project of Mike Migurski's. He was laid up in bed with a bad back and wanted to figure out a way that he could get useful information out of his city's official crime map. This thing is awful. You have to click through at least five forms until it even shows you a map, and when it does the data is often filtered down to too small of a subset to be useful. So he set about building an application that would basically submit every permutation of the application's forms, grab the images generated by each submission, find crime icons on them then put the locations and other metadata into his own database. In the process of creating interactive maps to look at the data he was collecting, he also built the first version of Modest Maps, a open source map interaction library which we now use for pretty much every single one of our map-related commercial projects.

Lillis: What are some of the public conversations that have opened up as a result of Crimespotting?Allen: A lot of people see Crimespotting as a shining example of open data, and a way for citizens to inform themselves about their community. During the site's first year we got some great feedback from Oakland residents who were bringing spreadsheets generated by Crimespotting to their regular meetings with local police officers and asking them what they were doing about, for instance, the recent rash of auto thefts in their neighborhood. Crimespotting armed these citizens with information that they used to have to rely on the police to get.

It's been a while since we've heard any more of those stories, though. Most mentions of Crimespotting that we read on the internet these days simply marvel at the number of dots on the map. Crimespotting does much more than just show you points on a map, though. You can get RSS feeds for crimes in your beat. We've applied for a grant to invest some serious time in Crimespotting and turn it into a site that engages journalists and (hopefully) fosters more direct civic engagement.

Lillis: Many of your projects depend on information coming from somewhere else. What has your experience been with government sources vs. citizen, or crowdsourced data?

Allen: My experience has been that just getting the data in the first place is the most difficult part of the process, regardless of the source. Crimespotting's original Oakland manifestation was an exercise in freeing a source of data that had never before been made publicly available, whereas the San Francisco version was built in less than a week after some very nice municipal employees who'd been tasked with opening the city's data provided us with a KML feed. The devil is in the details, though, and we often spend the entire duration of a project working out the specifics of data formats, timeliness, and completeness with our clients. We still don't have homicides in our San Francisco crime feed, for instance.

Lillis: In your In The News project, it seems that at some point you had to shut it down because you had too much information. Did you think about adding filters to create a unique experience for each user? Are there other ways you considered dealing with this surplus?

Allen: I actually just started working with Mike and Eric after they'd finished In the News, so I'm not qualified to answer that first question. But generally speaking, yes: while our first inclination—and our preference, I think—is to show everything, there are indeed data sets simply too large or complex to be visualized usefully in their entirety. One of the things that I think we do best is create interfaces that allow the user to filter data down into subsets that are manageable. It's important to build tools that can be played with and manipulated easily and in realtime. Those interactions are what help people discover new and exciting things at their own pace.

Lillis: I think we all have assumptions that we make about what "the crowd" is doing or thinking. Were you surprised by some of the patterns you saw emerging through your projects?

Allen: Absolutely. When I was working on the Digg Labs pieces I was constantly surprised at all of the weird stuff that people were submitting and digging. The dog pile effect of particularly big stories—which, in the world of tech, means events like the iPhone announcement and the AACS encryption key controversy—was pretty shocking, and a lot of fun to watch. Some stories broke on Digg before they broke on major news outlets, and it was fascinating to watch the conversation around them develop in this totally organic environment. It felt especially voyeuristic before the tools launched, too, because nobody knew that they were being watched like that. For a brief period we toyed with the idea of building versions of the visualizations that would help Digg find bots and track other abuses. But the public visualizations ended up being much more interesting and buzz-worthy.

Lillis: In the projects where you're collecting live data, have you witnessed people "playing to the room," where they seem to have changed their behavior because they know they're being monitored?

Allen: No doubt. Some Digg users dugg so many stories that their dots on Swarm turned into giant yellow orbs bigger than the stories themselves. A couple of people even posted videos on YouTube of their activity making the visualizations do weird stuff. Some stories blew up so quickly that they took over the screen, as was also the case during the MTV VMAs last September, when Kanye West stormed the stage and interrupted Taylor Swift's acceptance speech. At the height of that controversy there were thousands of mentions of Kanye on Twitter every minute, and a significant portion of them also happened to use the word "asshole": http://stamen.com/clients/mtv

Lillis: In some instances you're pulling in multiple data sets, have you had occasion to combine these to create or offer something you weren't expecting?

Allen: We've done some pretty cool stuff with a group called MySociety in the UK that cross references multiple data sets. Tom Carden created the first of our interactive travel time maps, which overlaid the shape representing how far you can get via public transit within a given time period with the cost of homes in the same area. The thresholds for each variable were adjustable individually and in realtime, and the map showed you areas where the data overlapped—that is, where you could buy a house for less than £500k *and* get to work from in less than an hour. We later developed this into a slippy map which you could pan and zoom, and introduced a third variable: "scenicness" scores culled from a site that MySociety set up to crowdsource Flickr photo ratings that could help you filter out less visually appealing regions.

Lillis: On your site, you refer to your clients as collaborators, how important is this distinction in your work?

Allen: I would say that it's paramount. The tighter our connection with the client, the faster things happen. We appreciate that some clients are going to defer to us on every design-related decision, but the smart ones who can call us out and involve themselves in the process are typically more fun to work with. We thrive on fast-paced projects, rapid iteration, and constructive feedback. If we haven't spoken to our client in a week something's broken.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

I'm a big fan of games that effectively use crowdsourced input as a solution to a very difficult problem. There are a number of examples like Google Image Labeler, and even the Guardian's attempt to keep their government transparent, by investigating expenses that "merit further investigation". However reCAPTCHA is a particularly effective one created by Carnegie Mellon Professor Luis von Ahn, which harnesses a reported 200 million solutions everyday. reCAPTCHA works by presenting a user with two words: one control, and one which could not be read by a computer. A human then enters both words, usually in an attempt to finalize a purchase at Ticketmaster, and if the control word is correct, it is assumed that the unknown word is also correct. The beautiful result: humans reading books, one word at a time, unlocking digital content along the way.

Andrew Sempere is a Cambridge, Mass.-based design researcher with IBM's Collaborative User Experience Group/Center for Social Software. He's also an artist whose interactive works have been exhibited (most recently) at the 2009 Boston Cyberarts Festival and the 7th Champ Libre Manifestation Internationale Video et Art Electronique in Montreal. Indirect Collaboration's Joshua Glenn interviewed Sempere — about online collaboration, for business and aesthetic purposes alike — via email, in February 2010.

GLENN: You work with social software researchers at IBM, helping them make smart decisions about encouraging or discouraging content sharing and reuse. How is doing so important to successful, inclusive business collaboration?

SEMPERE: My role is mostly to help the researchers think through user experience to develop an interface that helps support the work they are trying to do. I personally have a particular interest in the content sharing idea, but it's not always that, although it does usually come down to figuring out what design principles to apply in order to help the users and the researchers accomplish their goals. Since we mostly make prototype systems (and not customer facing products) I also consider a big part of my job to be keeping an eye on what is happening in the social software space outside of the corporation, to try and understand early and see if there is anything that can be adapted for use inside the enterprise.

GLENN: Some skeptics might say that sharing and reuse are antithetical to business culture...

SEMPERE: It depends on your definition of business, and of sharing! Usually when people say this, they mean "socialization" as in, "Isn't allowing my employees to socialize giving them allowance to goof off." Or the more formal "What's the ROI on social software." I think these questions are the wrong ones to ask. Companies have long recognized that social interaction is important to business — certainly at the executive level. Business is fundamentally about interpersonal relationships.

But if you are looking for a quantifiable cost savings as a result of providing your employees access to social software, you're probably not going to find it. It doesn't work that way.

This is a long way of saying: yes! If your definition of business culture is essentially Taylorist, then social software is completely antithetical, but so is Internet Culture. This collision leads to what I call Compliance Theatre (more on that later). Taylor's model of standardized work practices is about getting rid of the outliers. Imagine a bell curve... the purpose of standardization is to focus single mindedly on the middle of the curve, where things are average. You don't want the low end of the curve, and as a result you also get rid of the high end of the curve. In many organizations this turns out to be exactly what people want. You probably don't, for example, want MBTA operators texting each other, no matter how boring it is to drive exactly the same route in exactly the same way. You need their focus, and you need standard operation for safety.

In other organizations, eliminating the outliers is disastrous. Research, design, any field where you want creativity or are particularly interested in high quality output: you need to allow your employees to take risks.

There are other issues more specifically related to sharing and distribution which are diametrically opposed to certain business models. The music industry, for example, and the publishing industry to a certain extent. These industries were predicated on the notion of gatekeeping by controlling distribution channels, but in an era of nearly free distribution via the internet, they are mostly useless. This is not to say that music or books are useless, just the idea that you can profit off of distribution by selling little containers of culture — it's a broken idea.

GLENN: Speaking of gatekeeping, according to Eric Raymond's 1997 formulation, there are two methods of developing software (and by extension, anything): the "cathedral" approach, in which a group of experts do the work, and the "bazaar" approach — a cooperative activity initiated by members of the public. It seems to me that crowdsourcing software — which permits experts/gatekeepers to outsource part of their project to members of the public via a call for contributions — has been received so enthusiastically in business circles because it promises a third way, a synthesis of the cathedral and the bazaar. But is this enthusiasm misguided?

SEMPERE: I'm not entirely sure it's a synthesis, or just a case of the clergy of the cathedral occasionally buying things from the bazaar. TopCoder is the best example that I know of. The main takeaway for me from the cathedral and the bazaar argument is that it's a symbiotic (maybe codependent) relationship. Both must exist. Open source software works because professionally employed software developers have spare cycles. Second Life works because most of the residents have other sources of income. I think business is becoming more comfortable with the idea that this means they can take advantage of these spare cycles to get high quality work out of motivated individuals. It makes sense and it does work, at the same time it's not a sustainable business model, it's just a good way to accomplish some tasks. There are also serious issues from a business perspective related to licensing and such, but in general I think it's great that businesses are thinking flexibly. I do sometimes worry that it potentially devalues professional work, but I even if that is true, there's no stopping it.

GLENN: You're also interested in artistic collaboration. Last year, you published a paper analyzing the fraught psychological and cultural implications of making art within Second Life, whose object-creation tool assumes individual ownership as a prerequisite to the creative process. From the SL user's perspective, why shouldn't an artwork, like any other object, be governed by a commodity-style trading system?

SEMPERE: Second Life itself is not crucial to the fate of the universe, but it is very unique, and as such represents an excellent place to see where things might go (or might go wrong) as we continue down a path of virtualizing our culture. We humans, at least in the developed world, are moving anything and everything we can online, and developing new content, ideas and tropes that never existed in the analog world. This is not a bad thing at all, but I am deeply concerned that at the same time we are relinquishing ownership of our output to private organizations whose end goals and values are often accidentally preventing that culture from breathing properly, and in some cases smothering it.

A very small but significant portion of the content on Second Life is art. It is culturally significant, and it deserves a chance to play a part in art history. Even the "lowbrow" content is often part of someone's personal history and deserves some kind of respect.

The way that SL is designed, content is created by individuals, but owned by a private for-profit entity whose goal is (and perhaps should be) to make money. This isn't a bad thing, but the money making goal and the user created content goal interact in some strange ways:

I'm not a lawyer, but the ToS for Linden Lab (which apparently Lawrence Lessig consulted on), reads like a huge problem to me. Linden gives you full rights over your intellectual property, but they do NOT give you rights over the instantiation of that property. That is to say, if I build a house in SL, I own the idea of the house, but not the record of the house as it exists on Lindens servers. The idea is a good one — apparently it was Lessig's influence that ensured it wasn't the standard "LL owns everything." But, Linden has backed itself in a corner here. They promise ownership of IP, but they have also styled themselves as the content police, and are in fact being sued for failing to properly protect the "rights" of certain content creators. These individuals represent an extreme minority of the SL user base, but they, by virtue of invoking lawyers and DRM, are making world-changing decisions within the walls of SL.

Here's the doomsday scenario: The company goes under, the servers are sold. Since the ToS relinquish IP rights, whatever is left of the LL company cannot use the content, nor can any of the creditors. In fact, the content of the servers is worse than useless, it's a legal liability, since the ToS (might) open them to lawsuits. The safest course of action from a business perspective would therefore be to delete all the content. Literally, they will burn down a library, and ten years of collective work will be gone forever.

I mentioned I'm not a lawyer, and I actually hope that I'm wrong about my reading of the situation, but even if I am I think the example stands: extremely complicated negotiations are occurring right now in spaces where we are entrusting our cultural artifacts. These discussions are of crucial importance and worth keeping an eye on, especially since we are seeing a dismantling of public libraries and other shared institutions in favor of virtual archives controlled by private organizations.

Incidentally all of this virtual talk might be hard to fathom for people who haven't spent much time online, but try and imagine if Kodak asserted ownership over that box of super 8 movies in your parents' attic just because they made the film. It's already true that it's hard to view these technologically, but imagine that one day you pulled down the box to discover that every frame of your recorded memory had been deliberately erased, not because of time, or rot, or bugs, or neglect, but because of a licensing dispute at the Kodak company.

GLENN: Are we really moving towards this possibility?

SEMPERE: Yes — for example, the recent #amazonfail where Amazon retracted versions of Orwell's book that they didn't have the rights to, AFTER they were sold. iPhones and presumably iPads all have a built-in remote "kill switch" which allows them to delete apps and data from your device. The company has promised not to use this, but they reserve the right to, not to mention the fact that these days when I buy DRM music from itunes it's nothing like when my parents bought records. I won't be able to leave them for my kids to listen to without making sure they have my login, password and the right hardware, and I have a hard time imagining finding iTunes version 7 at a garage sale (especially since software is now distributed online, rather than via "dead media") the way you might find an old 8-track or phonograph.

We're moving towards a model where were we can casually consume content from the cloud and most of our structures of control are embedded in software. In many ways this is wonderful, but we need to be very very careful about what we're coding into the system if we don't want to risk accidentally creating a dark age.

There is also a secondary shorter point to be made here: by forcefully insisting (as Second Life does) that creative practice be monetized you exclude the outliers and push towards lowest common denominator content. Rather than make something interesting and daring, you will trend towards saleable, which means copying the tried and true. It's Taylorism again: terrific for selling widgets, terrible for culture. Linden has taken several steps to encourage more revenue (because they need it). I have friends who work there, and I don't want them losing their jobs either, but aggressively chasing every revenue stream, especially in a micro economy, completely destroys innovation.

GLENN: From the online arts community Learning to Love You More, which takes Fluxus-style assignments (e.g., "Recreate an object from someone's past") out of the gallery and onto your desktop, to Takashi Kawashima and Aaron Koblin's "Ten Thousand Cents," which used Amazon's Mechanical Turk service to outsource the digital painting of a $100 bill to thousands of turkers (who could each only see their own section of the picture), artists have started using "Web 2.0" (for lack of a better term) tools originally created for crowdsourcing or social networking as a spur to innovation and creativity. Are projects like these the antidote to Second Life's approach? Or do they also fail, albeit in a different way?

SEMPERE: They fail spectacularly but are beautiful for it. Fluxus is close, but yeah, I think the whole point of crowdsourcing an art piece is to play with the idea of an artwork as singular vision. The people who are contributing to the work (especially in the Mechanical Turk example) have unknown motivation, or are motivated by micropayments. Second Life artwork is still incredibly traditional in its approach (i.e., a single individual or close team working towards a single idea). None of this is problematic exactly, there's room for both, but what Second Life is missing is exactly what the other examples have — the ability to share and collaborate in a "Web 2.0" manner. As I said earlier, I don't think SL is the end-all of art in 2010, but as an example of what is possible it frustrates me for exactly that reason. There is a collision of world views, namely the Linden business model you are obliged to internalize (effectively the old commodity model, which requires single owner/creator permission systems and DRM to exist ) and the possibilities of a universe in which everyone can have infinite virtual resources. I think this categorizes the debate going forward on how we attempt to monetize creative work in an age where we have rendered distribution control effectively free. Devices like the iPhone and iPad and the Kindle seem to be aimed at this space. In particular I find it interesting that Apple created their own processor for the iPad. The only reason I can see for this is to control DRM down to the hardware level. We'll see, I guess.

GLENN: You recently gave a talk at the 2010 ACM conference on CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) on the topic, "What Changes Since Computation: A Design Manifesto for 2010." You took issue with the received wisdom that the work style of "digital natives" (those who've grown up using computers, the Internet, mobile phones, MP3s, etc.) is different in important ways — specifically having to do with social networking and online collaboration — from that of their elders. How is this by now widely accepted bit of common sense incorrect?

SEMPERE: I discussed the Digital Natives argument because I always find it frustrating. First and foremost, kids are no more born digital natives then they are born literate. Literacy (reading or computational) is something that is learned, taught, part of a culture. Also, pretty much anyone who uses email and IM (standard business tools these days) is already living in a virtual world. The first MMPORGs date to the early 1970s! So I believe the digital natives argument is baloney, but I also believe it is invoked as a kind of shorthand to describe a complex anxiety, and that's where it gets interesting.

People, especially business folks of a certain age, invoke this argument when they have faith in the structured, top down model of business and they begin to discover that work, actually, is occurring in a completely different way then they thought. Employees routinely socialize using websites and exchange information outside of the sanctioned tools. Employees are more comfortable crossing hierarchies, or with casual interpersonal communication that would be unheard of in their experience. It is all very confusing to someone who has internalized the myth that you work 9-5 and pass everything up and down the command chain.

As a result, a huge amount of effort is spent on compliance theatre: generating the illusion that business is proceeding along standard lines, while successful employees produce their work by circumventing the culture of control.

I borrow the term from Security Theatre, and here's an important subtlety: in both security and compliance theatre, it isn't that the theatre is pointless. Theatre is never pointless: It serves an extremely important role in re-enforcing organizational culture and defining mental boundaries. It also, ironically, enables circumvention by making a production of what is "important."

GLENN: I have experienced that problem — circumventing the culture of control — almost everywhere I've worked, even before Web 2.0 tools made doing so commonplace. Which is anecdotal evidence supporting your point that anti-gatekeeping trends making older people nervous in the business world aren't new — but they're newly exacerbated by new tools and software.

SEMPERE: I couldn't agree more — it's not new at all, just working at computational speed, and so more visible, and sometimes more effective (although counter measures can also move at this speed).

GLENN: In the art world, too, indirect collaboration is as old as the parlor game Consequences, whose descendants include the Surrealists' "Exquisite Corpse" technique, not to mention Mad Libs. Now that new tools and software have (unintentionally) made it simple to invite the general public to participate in various sorts of art projects, will we see (what you call) Compliance Theatre in art?

SEMPERE: Compliance Theatre in art? Why not! I suspect it's already there, and it probably depends on art versus Art. Certainly the art world has all kinds of theatricalities... I'll have to think on that one more!

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Breton's cadavre exquis could be argued as the first strict experimental art that began to play with the ideas behind collectivist artistic enterprise. Arising out of the surrealist movement, Breton, Duchamp, Tanguy and others completed each others drawings in an attempt to capture the ephemeral expressionist impulse that is born of multiple minds sharing a creative direction.

In our continuing series of interviews about Indirect Collaboration, we interviewed legendary underground comic artists Gary Panter and Charles Burns, on their continuing exquisite corpse game by mail.

How did the game start, and why?Gary Panter: Charles and I have done a lot of collaborative projects--exquisite corpse variations maybe, but not strictly the folded paper game of the Surrealists. We both participated in an exquisite corpse comic strip book initiated by Art Spiegelman where artists continued the comic strip begun by someone else with the rule that the through-character remained identifiable; Charles and I did a book which Charles initiated where we each drew grotesque faces to a template Charles made. In the book the faces were die-cut horizontally and bound so that you could scramble the faces; and even more fun, Charles and I have done fully collaborative comic stories that are elaborate jams that begin in person and continue through the mail.Charles Burns: I think there's a little confusion because Gary and I never really worked on an exquisite corpse together.

The first project we worked on together was a book called Facetasm where we created drawings of different heads that roughly fit a generic template and then the pages were cut into three parts (eyes, nose, mouth) and bound into a spiral bound book so all of the sections could be flipped back and forth creating multiple permutations. This came about because Gary and I were invited to be in a two-person exhibit together and I suggested making an announcement based on the "Facetasm" idea I just described and it grew from there.

The second collaboration resulted in a piece called "Pixie Meat" (above). This was a number of comic pages we worked on together, first in pencil and then in ink. Gary was visiting me in Philadelphia and I pulled out a stack of old comics and magazines for "inspiration" and we just sat and drew with no real intention in mind other than enjoying an afternoon sitting at big kitchen table drawing. We continued passing the pages back and forth for a few months and eventually had enough pages to publish a short piece. We asked our friend, novelist Tom DeHaven to write text for our artwork and then had it published.

Our collaborations came about simply because I love Gary's work and thought it would be fun to mix our different styles together. It's rare for me to work in any collaborative manner and this was an excuse to sit and come up with some absurd-looking drawings. When I was growing up, I forced my friends to sit and draw with me and in some way this had a similar feel too it... Looking over and seeing that your friend had come up with something amazing. Had either of you ever done an exquisite corpse game before? If so, with who? How was that game different from this one?

GP: I have done exquisite corpse at parties and there was a book published by the Drawing Center , years ago that Charles and I were probably both in. To me it is a light-weight party game and not the best way to make a piece of art together. Not my favorite art game.

CB: I've done exquisite corpse drawings with my friends before and they're fun but never seem to amount to much other than a diversion... a drawing on a cocktail napkin. I was invited to participate in an exquisite corpse exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York and I managed to find a way to do a collaboration with Mark Beyer and Peter Saul -- it sounded like a great match, but to be honest, the end result wasn't all that interesting.

Was there something in particular about each other that made the game make more sense, than with other artists?

CB: I enjoyed working together with Gary because we share similar interests (comic books, monster magazines, Japanese toys) but our drawing styles are different enough to make end result unpredictable. I also really enjoyed taking his pencil drawings and rendering them in ink -- it's a way of really examining how another artist constructs a drawing.GP: I've collaborated with a lot of friends on drawings. Most collaborations don't work and need to be terminated in the bud. With Charles there is a deep respect and trust and love of play.

What's the pushme-pullyou aspect of your particular collaborative relationship? Is one person more likely to make the first line, or push it in a different direction?GP: In most collaborations, I have been involved there is a leader and a willing accomplice. But mainly laughter is the organizing principle in the collaboration. Charles and I both feel free to erase or alter the game. Charles is one of the best inkers in the world and I am shaky, so I have to get a good brush and do the tighten up to play, but that is fun. We learn from each other.

Is there an element of competition?

GP: No, I don't think so. We are trying to make each other laugh and make something that fuses together.

CB: There was no competition. There was really only the hope that we'd come up with something fun to look at - a weird hybrid of our styles and imagery.

Do you find yourself being more of less free, creatively, when you know someone else will also have input? Do you rein yourself in, in the expectations of the other, or do you let yourself go more, challenging the other person to make something of it?CB: For me doing a collaboration is taking "time out" from my usual work. It's actually fun to do and I think part of the reason is there are different expectations and less control. It's like letting go of the tight control I always maintain on my writing and drawing and allowing myself to work on something with no "rules". For it to work there has to be a mutual respect, but you also need to be aggressive enough to alter (fuck-up?) the other persons drawing.

GP: In order to draw with someone or make music together there has to be close listening and watching and an intent to make a collective vision rather than a singular vision.

Is there something about collaborative art that isn't there with solo art? Is it useful, or just a parlor game?

CB: Collaboration for me is about letting go of all my control and forcing myself to explore a different perspective. Although we share similar interests, Gary constantly comes up with ideas and images I could never possibly imagine -- that's when it gets good.

GP: Charles and I have made drawing that i think are very important to us. That goes for the other collaborations we have done with friends, like Art Spiegelman, Edwin Pouncey, Jay Cotton and Ric Heirtzman and more.

I like that the notion that "being allowed to fuck up": in all the collaborative art projects I've done, it's also been a just-for-fun game, as well, which to me speaks to rigorous idealism behind singular artistic vision. In popular culture, artists are always portrayed as 'free spirits', but the artists I know are some of the most tightly dedicated people to their very particular way of doing something. Additionally, the ideal of the artist is that of auteur genius. Collaboration can fracture of the benevolent dictatorship of artistic vision, which we've already revealed can occasionally be a good thing; you're obviously just two people playing; would it work better or worse with four people? How about 10 or 20? CB: I've done several collaborations and they usually work best with just one other person. With two minds, the focus is tighter and the end results are usually more interesting. GP: A one to one collaboration is better for me. There is a better chance to find the middle ground. More people more chaos. The Zap artists were really good at jamming. Most jams look like shit.Our panel in March is obviously focusing of collective creativity, and in particular how it manifests itself on the web. We in our culture, and especially on the internet, tend to value egalitarianism, at least in theory; but in the art world, the tight focus is on the dominant individual. Are internet culture and art culture wildly divergent for that reason? And if they are different, what does that mean for both? What if Vermeer had to fret obsessively as to whether his teeshirt design would get voted for on Threadless?

GP: Projects do need leaders or cheerleaders. Often one person will push the project harder. There is the danger of people getting too knitted together. We have to learn to easily move from isolated creative vision and consensual ideation and work. I am interested in the strength of little things and little things as prototypes for bigger things, so a team of one or two or three appeals to me. Vermeer would've done one t-shirt in his whole career and he would've known it was the best t-shirt Threadless ever had.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

While I don't recommend letting the crowd grope you (unless you are into that), Fleshmap investigated the online equivalent by looking at the collective perception of erogenous zones. They used Amazon's Mechanical Turk to ask hundreds of people to rank how good it would feel to touch a lover's private parts and plotted the results as a heatmap (image right). The result is not surprising, but I always like good examples of crowdsourced input that confirm for us what we already know.

‘Coalition of The Willing’ is a film that discusses how we can use new internet technologies to leverage the powers of activists, experts, and ordinary citizens in collaborative ventures to combat climate change. Through analyses of swarm activity and social revolution, ‘Coalition of the Willing’ makes a compelling case for the new online activism and explains how to bring the fight against global warming to the people. As the film tackles the subject of online activism, we decided that the logical home for ‘Coalition of The Willing’ is here online.

The script was co-written by philosopher/writer/filmmaker Tim Rayner and artist Simon Robson of Knife Party (an animation collective). Viewers can watch the collaborative process online, from script to storyboards to production, via the project website and a variety of social media platforms. In this instance, the mission of the project is issue-driven, and a certain level of proficiency exists because the participants were hand-picked rather than randomly sourced.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Having grown up in the Boston area, I've chuckled to myself a few times after hearing about Washington DC getting a dusting of snow that renders the city helpless. Now they've had a very real storm, and they're working to get back on their feet. Having been caught mostly unprepared, and with an infrastructure that seems to be lacking in the snow-response department, the people are taking action.

Armed with an online tool, Snowmageddon Clean-up, some snowed-in and stranded folks are seeking help. Sponsored by The Washington Post and PICnet, the website lets visitors post shovel requests, icy street warnings, and other storm-related info. There seems to be a system in place to verify the posts, which while subjective, is probably a good thing. That way the site can stay focused on shoveling parties, community-building and information-sharing. It's a little like a super-specific, less creepy Craigslist. So with this verification system implemented, how did the "My Boyfriend is Driving me Crazy" post get through?

"Right now my 24-year-old boyfriend is flapping his arms, proclaiming "I'm the Mothman!" (He's watching Monsterquest) I hope this illustrates why we both need to get out of the apartment. Somebody please melt all the snow."

Now, I'm no square, I think this is hilarious. But really, why is it there? It's the tipping point. Will this site turn into a geo-twitter, where we can see exactly where people have run out of tea? I would argue that this is one instance in which a strong gate-keeper is really vital. Or am I the curmudgeon who won't tolerate a joke? Also here's this, which is just bizarre - Snowpocalypse

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

San Francisco media artist Takashi Kawashima has been exploring crowdsourced art for a few years, now.

For example, Takashi's 2005 project "The King Has...", a collaboration with Krister Olsson, invited people to text the artist(s) their most burdensome secrets; these secrets were then posted (anonymously) in a public place. Video below:

Between November 2007 and March 2008, Takashi collaborated with Aaron Koblin on "Ten Thousand Cents," a "coordinated, crowdsourced [digital] art project" created by several thousand individuals using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service — a crowdsourcing marketplace, publicly launched in 2005, that enables computer programs to coordinate the use of human intelligence — and a customized Flash-based drawing software.

Koblin and Takashi divided a high-res scan of the $100 bill into 10,000 equal parts, each of which was delivered to a "turker" who was paid a penny to duplicate it using the drawing tool. Contributors (who hailed from 51 different countries) didn't have any idea of the whole picture. The project took 5 months to complete; the idea was to use 10,000 turkers, but some turkers participated more than once. The end result was a reproduction of a $100 bill that cost $100 to create. Video:

There's a neat interface here that lets you watch any one of the 10,000 Flash paintings being created. "Ten Thousand Cents" was a finalist (Experimental category) for a SXSW Web Award in 2009.

More recently, Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey collaborated on "Bicycle Built for Two Thousand" (great title), which used Amazon Mechanical Turk to record 2,088 sound clips. Turkers were sent a short-short sound clip — snipped from a mechanical-speech version of the 1892 song "Daisy Bell" — and asked to imitate what they heard, using a custom audio recording tool in a web browser. They were not given additional information. People from 71 countries participated; they were paid six cents apiece. Stitched back together, the clips sound like this:

"At this very moment, a man is locked up to a park bench at Union Square Park in San Francisco. To unlock him, find the woman in the red scarf at the Atlas Cafe in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She is the only one who has the combination to the lock. She will give it to you. Can you find a way to set this man free? He is hungry and wants to go home."

This is the fourth in a series of "Wappenings" (2004-ongoing) created by Walton to see how fast, creative, and cooperative social networks really are. The first three Wappenings also had a challenge built into the plea, with a stranger awaiting relief from a predicament. For instance, a man stands unable to put on his coat, despite freezing weather, until a stranger gives him an orange; or a young (attractive, single, bookish) woman is scheduled to drop her books and papers down the steps of New York Public Library at noon, will someone be there to assist her?). These requests are posted on Walton's website and circulated voluntarily by the usual social networking platforms, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

How long did it take for the stranger to be freed from his park bench prison? According to Walton:

"It took about 2 hours to unlock the guy. Apparently, the manager at the cafe got a handful of calls asking to speak to a girl wearing a red scarf. He wouldn't help out of respect for his customers. Finally, Katrina (from SF) sent a FAX. Yes, in 2010 a fax solves the communication riddle. She got the combo and unlocked Lucas. It was starting to rain even harder..."

What I like about this series is that there is no monetary reward for participation, and the situations require cooperation and ingenuity (like if the phone doesn't work, try the fax machine). The humanitarian bent is an interesting twist, too. I wonder if passersby get in on the act, or if all participants know the circumstances in advance. Walton's Wappenings are simple enough to be solved, however, not all networked "good will" efforts are this uncomplicated. See Patrick Philippe Meier's very intriguing blog post, Using Mechanical Turk to Crowdsource Humanitarian Response.

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Jeff Howe, the man who coined the term "crowdsourcing" with Chris Anderson in 2006, has created a series of "how(e) to crowdsource" videos for American Express' Open Forum (itself a kind of online collaborative platform for small businesses). Here are Howe's five tips.

These tips are posted on a major credit card's website. Which begs the question: has crowdsourcing been so co-opted by corporations that its potential has been stunted? The first instances of crowdsourcing (distributed computing) typically involved solving a complex problem (mapping the human genome, searching for extraterrestrial life) that had an impact on humanity. I'm not sure that a crowd-generated commercial for Heinz Ketchup can do the same.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

In some ways, markets can be thought of as crowdsourced input. While it is perhaps a bit of a stretch to claim that markets facilitate indirect collaboration, a nice example of what I mean is illustrated with the project "One Thousand Paintings".

onethousandpaintings.com is an art experiment that explores the role of crowdsourced input in valuation of art. The project is the brainchild of Swiss artist/Stanford evolutionary biologist Marcel Salathe whose other projects include "Webpages as graphs", "Salathe & White - Art Bond Project". The basic premise behind this experiment is that there is a tremendous uncertainty in the value of artwork. A prominent example of this was illustrated in 2003 when 24 paintings thought to be authentic Jackson Pollocks were discovered. Determining their authenticity, or lack thereof, modifies their value by hundreds of millions of dollars.

So the question behind onethousandpaintings.com is: What if you let the crowd, mediated by the market, determine the value of the art? While you may argue that this is nothing more than supply/demand economics, onethousandpaitings takes it to an entirely new level by incentivizing early adopters with what has been likened to a mashup of "eBay with a pyramid scheme".

The price = 1000 - number on the painting. The first 100 paintings are discounted by 90%, with a 10% decrease in the discount every time 100 paintings are sold. So, for example, painting 50 should cost $950 (1000-50). However if you are one of the first one hundred people to purchase, you get it at the fire sale price of $95. The "indirect collaboration" comes into play when you consider that the value of your painting increases only when others, your collaborators, purchase more paintings.

I'm not sure whether or not this meets the criterion of crowdsourced input on the creative process, but it is surely a nice way to think about markets. Full disclosure, I am the proud owner of 626.

An online discussion about the role of crowd-sourced input on the creative process, in anticipation of the upcoming South by Southwest Interactive Panel, tentatively at 11 AM, on March 15th, in Room 10AB of the Austin Convention Center.